I have bough an external Seagate 1TB drive, which my XP system can see and will write files to, however when I use Partition Magic it describes the whole partition as BAD, and it is shown in yellow. All the options are greyed out. When I use Drive Image XML to try and copy drive to drive (I want a comlplete copy of my C drive including OS), I get an error message saying it can't lock the drive. The external drive is brand new and uses NTFS. Any ideas? Seagate 'support' haven't bothered getting back to me. Incidentally, I have another external drive (320GB), which uses FAT32 and Partition Magic sees that fine. I am doing a full format of the Seagate at the moment, to see if this helps. Thanks in advance!

Partition Magic is quite outdated and should probably not be trusted. GParted is a decent free alternative. Paragon Hard Disk Manager is a similar, much more recent product.
–
oKtosiTeDec 2 '10 at 21:30

2 Answers
2

Run the Seatools HDD testing tool on the external HDD. This is the only for-sure way to see if there is anything wrong with the drive. If there is, I would return it to where you purchased it from and demand a refund or exchange for a new drive. One thing to do as well is RMA the external drive to Seagate with the error code that Seatools produces if the drive is bad

I have seen this once, when I had two partitions on the hard drive, and one of them was a ext2 filesystem. Is it possible you have a very small partition on the drive? Perhaps one of those recovery partitions that comes installed? You can use a partition table viewer to see how many partitions you have.